Finland’s Famous Education System: Unvarnished Insights into Finnish Schooling

This open access book provides academic insights and serves as a platform for research-informed discussion about education in Finland. Bringing together the work of more than 50 authors across 28 chapters, it presents a major collection of critical views of the Finnish education system and topics that cohere around social justice concerns. It questions rhetoric, myths, and commonly held assumptions surrounding Finnish schooling. This book draws on the fields of sociology of education, education policy, urban studies, and policy sociology. It makes use of a range of research methodologies including ethnography, case study and discourse analysis, and references the work of relevant theorists, including Bourdieu and Foucault. This book aims to provide a critical, updated and astute analysis of the strengths and challenges of the Finnish education system. .

Introduction -- Part 1: Politics, policy, teachers and edu-business -- Municipal governance of comprehensive education: The emergence of local universalisms -- Finland’s ministry of education and culture in the light of its working groups -- A progressive force in Finnish schooling?: Finland’s education union, OAJ and its influence on school-level education policy -- Finnish quality evaluation discourse: Swimming against the global tide? -- Ecological sustainability and steering of Finnish comprehensive schools -- Unmentioned challenges of Finnish teacher education: Decontextualisation, scientification and the rhetoric of the research-based agenda -- Teachers’ expectations and expectations of teachers: Understanding teachers’ societal role -- Businessing around comprehensive schooling -- Co-operation of edu-business and public schooling: Is the governance of education in Finland shifting from the public sector to networks?- Part 2: Equity, inequality, and the challenges of diversity, language and inclusion -- “Three bedrooms and a nice school” — Residential choices, school choices and vicious circles of segregation in the education landscape of Finnish cities -- Pupil selection and enrolment in comprehensive schools in urban Finland -- Everyday life in schools in disadvantaged areas -- Divided cities — Divided schools? School segregation and the role of needs-based resource allocation in Finland -- The significance of socioeconomic background for the educational dispositions and aspirations of Finnish school leavers -- Controversies and challenges in the history of gender discourses in education in Finland -- Rainbow paradise? Sexualities and gender diversity in Finnish schools -- Racism in Finnish school textbooks: Developments and discussions -- Saami language online education outside the Saami homeland — New pathways to social justice -- Education of pupils with migrant backgrounds: A systemic failure in the Finnish system? -- Negotiated, given and self-made paths: Immigrant origin girls and post-compulsory educational transition in Finland -- Language education for everyone? Busting access myths -- Rethinking Finland’s official bilingualism in education -- Religions and worldviews as “the problem” in Finnish schools -- Inclusion in Finland: Myths and realities -- Exclusively included? Finland’s inclusion success story and hidden dual system of mainstream and special needs education -- Student disengagement in Finnish comprehensive schooling -- Part 3: Epilogue -- The Foundations of Critical Studies in Education in Finland.